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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Facebook’s New Paid Messaging Feature – A Tax On Being Social?

Facebook is reported to be testing out a new money-grabbing feature on its social network, charging users a $1 fee to send messages directly to the inbox of non-friends, thus ensuring they’re not labeled as spam.

The pilot scheme is currently only available to users based in the US, and so far can only be used by individuals, which thankfully means that brands can’t pay to spam our inboxes – yet!

According to the Facebook, the scheme basically makes sure that messages land directly in a user’s inbox, which means they’ll be seen as soon as the intended recipient logs into Facebook, rather than going into the seldom-visited ‘Other’ folder.

“This test is designed to address situations where neither social nor algorithmic signals are sufficient. For example, if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox. For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them.”

Now I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a little bit of uproar over this latest profiteering move by Facebook, which comes just days after it was forced into a humiliating climb down over its plans to sell users photos on Instagram. Whilst Facebook says that the intention is to make sure that people’s important messages are seen, it does seem to be a rather anti-social measure.

Efforts to reduce the amount of spam sent through Facebook are normally welcome, but doing so in way that penalizes those who have a genuine reason to want to contact someone will only serve to discourage them. Let’s face it, NOBODY likes giving their money to Facebook, a brand that is widely perceived to be utterly ruthless in its quest to profit from its users. By forcing people to pay to ensure their message lands in someone’s inbox, many people will simply say “no”, and either look for an alternative way to contact them, or just not bother at all.

The other issue is that the feature could allow anyone with money to override a user’s personal settings. It’s possible to set your message filter so that you only receive messages from those people you know, but now Facebook seems to be letting people pay to bypass this filter?

No one is denying that keeping scammers and spammers at bay is a huge challenge for social media sites, but measures like this immediately raise suspicions that Facebook is once again disguising its insatiable greed as yet another ‘improvement’ that few people will benefit from.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.